Review Summary: Not great in itself, but great as a comparison to the material they released later
Acylum reminds me of Laphroiag single-malt scotch. Laphroiag is famous or infamous depending on your relationship with whiskey – it either tastes like smokey nectar, or else it tastes like an ashtray. It’s the former for me, but it’s definitely an acquired taste, and it’s not a whiskey I’d come home to every night.
Not being close to a large Goth-Industrial music scene (I live in a part of the U.S. where buffalo still literally roam), I discovered Acylum on one of staff member Trey’s lists, where he recommended Acylum’s
The Enemy, as one of the best albums in the genre. It was WAY too abrasive for me at first, not like listening to music at all; it was rather like “listening” to the machinery of an actual industrial factory. But like good Islay whiskey, I’ve come to appreciate its bite.
Comparing The Enemy to our album under discussion here, Pest, reveals that Acylum’s style seems to have evolved into a loose set of substyles. This gives Pest a somewhat fragmented feel. But those “substyles” were woven together into a more coherent style on their following album
Kampf Dem Verderb.
STYLES
I perceived Pest as a loose collection after reading an interview on Side-line Magazine, during which Pedro Engel revealed a couple of substyles by which their (he partners Acylum with his wife Nadine ‘Cooraz’ Engel) music can be described: “Dark-electro” (this has a Wikipedia reference) and “Gothic-electro” (this does not have a Wikipedia reference), with their most recent offering grading towards the latter type. These also turn out to be convenient handles for analyzing the songs on Pest.
The entry on “Dark-electro” from Wikipedia attributes the style to Skinny Puppy and The Klinik. I don’t know the last band, but I guess I can hear Puppy’s influence in songs like “Breivik” and “History Repeats Itself.” There are other ancestors on this album, though, most prominently the percussive militancy of bands like Ministry, Front 242 and Front Line Assembly in the songs “Vaterland,” “Zigeunerjunge,” and “The Rhythm of Violence.” This is especially relevant in the case of “History Repeats Itself” and “Vaterland” where the bagpipe tunes generate in some of us a strong association – thanks to Hollywood – of bagpipes and medieval warfare.
I’m not really a fan of what Americans usually call Gothic (I think Europeans might use the word differently) music outside of a handful of bands. So in trying to discern the “Goth” elements on Pest, in songs like “Dear God,” “Our Last Breath,” “Heads of Innocents,” “Follow Me,” and especially “Plague,” I would hazard that besides Puppy and the other core industrial pioneers listed above, these songs perhaps share a musical ancestry with the blood-thirsty vampire culture of Bauhaus and Siouxsie, and – fast tempos aside – an ATMOSPHERIC ancestry with the threatening satanic-witchcraft inspired by Sabbath but brought to a pitch with bands like Slayer and Mercyful Fate. Acylum doesn’t use satanic imagery, but when listening to their music I definitely have a strong sense of menace and evil intent.
NOISE AS A MUSICAL ELEMENT
One consistent sound in Acylum’s instrumental toolbox is the use of outrageously, distressingly abrasive white-noise as a musical element. Pedro Engels, if not responsible for introducing this sound into music, is Industrial’s foremost practitioner. It is this sound – the sound of television static cranked at high volume – that put me off the band the first time I heard them, where they used it throughout The Enemy, unbearably so on the song “Breaking The Chains.” Acylum isn’t alone in dabbling in discordant sounds, sometimes to great effect: witness
Suicide Commando’s “Dying Breed,”
Combichrist’s “This *** Will Fcuk You Up,” and
Front Line Assembly’s experiments with dubstep (not-white-noise-but-almost) sounds on their album Echogenetic. Unfortunately, though, I don’t care for Acylum’s use of it when it dominates their songs, as it does on the Pest tracks “Born To Be Hated” and “My Knife.” While the last one is basically unlistenable to my ears, “Born To Be Hated” has some great synth work – but it’s a flavor of whiskey with a SERIOUS bite, and only for VERY rare occasions.
Pest doesn’t quite belong on the same shelf as its predecessors, The Enemy and Karzinom. But it DOES reveal a technique that was slightly more embryonic and less controlled on those albums: The beginnings of Acylum’s abilities to quiet-down the static and integrate it into the music as either an accompaniment to the drums, as a bassline, or as a drone.
(Professional reviewers may take exception to my use of the term “drone” here: Isn’t a drone just a bassline? But the Engels are fond of medieval music-making techniques, and “basslines” in those days were performed with organs, bagpipes and bagpipe-like instruments that produced a “drone,” often just a sustained single tone. So I’m going with that term to distinguish it from an instrumental bassline, which moves around more).
The use of white-noise is sprinkled throughout most of the songs on Pest, and integrated for example into the rhythm of the drums on “Breivik;” into the bassline on “Our Last Breath” and “The Plague;” and craftily managed as a drone on “Pest” and “History Repeats Itself” (in the latter track the static acts as a SECONDARY drone beneath the drone-like tune of the synthetic bagpipe).
FAST SONGS VS. SLOW DARKNESS
Honestly, fast tempos aren’t really Acylum’s forte. I can’t think of any of their songs that have the driving “usually-just-danced-to-but-totally-moshable” songs found in Aggrotech, for example Grendel’s “Judged Ones” or more recently Hocico’s “Lost World.” No, speed doesn’t seem to be a priority in the Dark-electro genre, which, if I’m safe in tagging the recent work of
Psyclon Nine’s
Less to Heaven and
Dawn of Ashes’ Scars of the Broken with that label, tend to revel in slow to mid-tempo darkness.
There are a couple of fast tracks on Pest, though they lack the staccato intensity of EBM/Aggrotech, and opt instead for a “slower” pounding reminiscent of the electronic tracks on Ministry’s Land of Rape and Honey. Of the two faster songs on Pest, “Zigeunerjunge” and “The Rhythm of Violence,” the latter is the faster, possibly because it’s a collaboration with
Wynardtage, a band who apparently gets more of a buzz out of writing in an EBM/Aggrotech style.
In comparison, the Engels apparently get their creative buzzes – I of course can only surmise this by listening to their music – from creating sonic atmospheres, and in this ability they have few peers. Their most recent album, Kamp Dem Verderb, is a masterful showcase of ominous, foreboding, despairing and hopeless darkness, but Pest has a few semi-precious gems: “Dear God,” “Breivik,” and “Romance,” the latter a profoundly ironic title given the horror-inducing contents of the song (just listen to the samples -- you’ll see what I mean).
CONCLUSION
Pest isn’t Acylum’s best album. Probably I’d rank it 4th behind Karzinom, 5th if we count the EP Filthy Memories. Most songs are average to good with only a handful of great ones, so I rated it lowish. But Pest is a critical album for fans because it’s an outstanding landmark for the band’s style, where the Engels are experimenting with the elements I discussed above, the elements they were able to weave seamlessly into the superb album that followed, Kampf Dem Verderb.
